The genre has evolved, whether you like it or not. Calling games which have taken the original formula and tried to shake it up a bit generic is pretty silly. Personally, I like the newer style RTSs because they make me think about things in different ways, rather than approaching it from the same rapidfire, microcentric way every time. To each his/her own.

It's funny - I'm even seeing a lot of this sort of sentiment about Blizzard stuff (read: Starcraft 2) nowadays, with people saying they're bored of the tried-and-true but will probably buy it anyway, largely due to the cutscenes. "I bought this to see movies, but wow look, a game came with it." Lotta money to watch some movies, when you can just hop on youtube a few weeks after release and watch them all.

THQ/Relic are doing something very similar with Dawn of War 2 being the game will ship with only the Space Marine campaign.

That IS a good point, but only to a certain extent. Dow2 is doing a single race in a single game, with the public knowing there will be expansions further down the line to add more content. Blizzard, on the other hand, is breaking the traditional model by turning the game into a triple release so that it's much more expensive to get in on the ground level, even before you start talking expansions.

The funny thing is, as much as people are complaining, y'all are still going to be fighting tooth and nail to get in line for your copy.

the campaign is one of the things they want to address, supposedly, although how soon that'll happen is anyone's guess.

Overall I think this is a neat game but being a single-player only kinda guy (skirmish - really couldn't care less about a campaign), playing vs. the AI wasn't enough to hold my interest for very long.

Actually, I fully intend on continuing to use XP at least until the next major MS OS release. I've been very happy with it since day 1 stability-wise and nothing I've seen about Vista from the exposure I've had to it (mostly in a support capacity) has gotten me interested in converting. I play very few "high-end games" these days and there's no other driving reason for me to upgrade... so then, why bother?

I just checked out that chart. Interesting info - down from almost 9k players in December to less than 2k now? That's pretty extraordinary. You can even see the little spike resulting from the medic unlock release, but needless to say it's dropped back down again pretty quickly.

Other non-TF2 stuff that stands out:

--I'll never understand how CS maintains. --Ut2004 holding steady at just under 4k players, while UT3 is showing less than 400?! Can that actually be accurate?